On the Trail of “Kumbaya”

Topic: CRS Version
Voices has just published an article I researched with John Blocher Jr called “Kumbaya and Dramatizations of an Etiological Legend.” [1]  The abstract appears on the Papers tab.

An etiological legend is a story that explains something.  In this case, I looked at ways people acted on their belief that “Kumbaya” was brought to this country by an American Protestant missionary sent to Africa.

In order to argue tales about an African genesis were legends, I needed to establish the American origins of the song.  This is the most important contribution made by the article.

I knew from my research for Camp Songs, Folk Songs, that the man who first published “Kumbaya” in its current form, Lynn Rohrbough, began by selling custom songbooks with material provided by his customers. [2]

I also knew from the collections I’d seen when I was a child that Cooperative Recreation Service (CRS) published songs that already were in tradition, often with incorrect ascriptions.  That is, Rohrbough credited the person who gave him a song with being the composer.

For instance, “My Paddles Keen and Bright” was written by Margaret Bradshaw McGee in 1918 at the Camp Fire Girls’ first camp, Sebago-Wohelo. [3]  Rohrbough simply said it was “contrib. by Vera Hollenffer.” [4]  Whoever edited a later edition of a CFG songbook corrected this. [5]

Rohrbough later began inviting international students from local colleges to come to events at his recreation center in Delaware, Ohio, and taped songs they knew. [6]  Since I had learned he was not a musician, [7] I assumed he had to hire others to transcribe songs for him.

For example, he published a collection titled Aloha Sampler that included “Aloha means we welcome you.”  He said it was Hawaiian and “set down by Miss Haruka Yabusaki,” [8] and arranged by Max Exner in 1962. [9]

In fact, it was composed at Aloha Hive, a private girls’ camp in Vermont founded by Edward Leeds Gulick.  His brother was Luther Halsey Gulick.  Luther’s wife, Charlotte Vetter Gulick, ran Sebago-Wohelo in Maine.  The Gulick’s grandparents were Presbyterian ministers in Hawaii, and I was told there still were “numerous grass skirts in the costume room” at Aloha Hive. [10]

I reasoned, if Rohrbough hired someone like Exner to transcribe “Kumbaya,” he would have had to have written a check.  That meant business records, the backbone of our knowledge of ancient world economics. [11]  I wondered if any had survived.

Rohrbough sold CRS to a group in North Carolina in 1976, and the company name was changed to World Around Songs (WAS). [12]  It, in turn, sold the business to Bruce Greene.

I sent Greene an email asking if he had any business records.  He was a fiddle and banjo player [13] who had more important things to do than rummage through files.  Instead, he sent me a file of papers related to the song in April 2016. [14]

One thing was clear by then.  Actual business records no longer existed.  Back before computers, small businesses threw out old papers when their file cabinets became full.  Larry Nial Holcomb said “most of the business records before 1960” had been destroyed by the time he was interviewing Rohrbough for his 1972 dissertation. [15]  Since then they have been boxed up twice. [16]

Soon after the interim company took control, Marvin Frey sent CRS a letter threatening to sue for copyright infringement. [17]  Law suits are almost as good as ledgers in preserving mundane details from the past.  Most of the documents in the folder related to Frey.

However, they were a few earlier letters that had been saved by Rohrbough. [18]  One contained the sentence “Professor Chance of Baldwin-Wallace, who had it from Melvin Blake, a returned missionary from Angola, in the winter of 1954–55, had jotted down this mispronunciation to John Blocher, Jr., who first notated the song.” [19]

Names.  Like anyone who took a journalism class in high school, I went online to identify the people mentioned in the letter.  That’s how I discovered John Blocher.  He, indeed, was the man who transcribed the tune as we know it for a Columbus, Ohio, Methodist family camp songbook.

I listed him as a co-author because he not only gave me details on the early version of the song, but also began contacting people he knew, including a child of Katharine Thompson Good.  Good was the one who taught him the song.

Most of the people, who were mentioned in Rohrbough’s letter, were born in the early 1920s.  Their children were not of an age to know what their parents were doing when they were away from home in the 1950s.

I was still operating from the limited information I had about Rohrbough’s activities.  I asked Blocher if Good’s child remembered being taken to one of Rohrbough’s recreation open houses in Delaware.  I thought a 25-mile trip to a room filled with strangers might be something a child would remember.

He was told that Good never went to Delaware, but did attend annual meetings of the Buckeye Recreation Workshop.

Blake had an online presence.  He had been a Methodist missionary in Angola from 1948 to 1956, and later worked for the central office on missionary work for the church in New York.  He was important enough to merit several obituaries.

The problem with Blake was that, before airplanes made trans-Atlantic flights easy, most missionaries spent their entire periods in the field.  For him to be the source for “Kumbaya,” he had to have been in the United States sometime before 1955 when CRS published Blocher’s version of the song.

I sent an inquiry to the archives of the Methodist Church asking if there was any record of Blake being in the United States, particularly his home state of Indiana, in 1954.  Again, I got lucky.  Frances Lyons sent back a note saying “I found evidence in the files that Melvin Blake visited Indiana in 1952.” [20]

She sent me copies of letters from Blake’s file.  I did not ask for personal or denomination information, so I don’t know why he was in the country in 1952.  While it would be interesting, it probably would not be relevant to the history “Kumbaya.”

One of the letters indicated Blake was scheduled to speak at a church youth conference at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, that attracted thousands.  Any one of the participants could have been from Ohio, and later gone to the Buckeye Workshop meeting.

Thanks to the help of Blocher, Greene, and Lyons, I have a working hypothesis explaining how “Come by Here” crossed the color line to become “Kumbaya.”  The connecting links are still missing.  I don’t know who taught Blake “Come by Here,” and I don’t know who introduced it at the Buckeye Workshop.

These details may never be known.  This all happened almost seventy years ago.  Few who were adolescents or adults at the time still are alive.  When Blocher died last year, he was a hundred years old.

Voices is published by New York Folklore.  For that reason, I emphasized the contributions of people from that state: May Titus and Pete Seeger.  In the next few posts, which initiate a new series on the CRS version, I will provide more information on other people who contributed to the creation of what we now call “Kumbaya.”  Some of their photographs appear on the Photos K tab.

End Notes
1.  Copies may be ordered by email from info@nyfolklore.org or by regular mail from New York Folklore.  129 Jay Street.  Schenectady, New York.  12305.  It's $3.00 for a PDF of the article.  The draft, with corrections, additional photographs, and more detailed footnotes has been uploaded to the Academia.edu website.

2.  Camp Songs.  58.
3.  Camp Songs.  445.

4.  “Canoe Song.”  73 in Music Makers.  Published for the Camp Fire Girls by CRS.  I purchased my copy around 1955 when my mother was a CFG leader.  Vera Helgesson Hollenffer was a physical education teacher in San Francisco’s Lux School for Industrial Training for Girls in the 1930s. [21]

5.  Margaret Embers McGee.  “Canoe Round.”  73 in Music Makers.  Published for the Camp Fire Girls by CRS.  I bought my copy in Findlay, Ohio, around 1974.  Embers was a camp name.

6.  Ernest Amy.  “Cooperative Recreation Service: A Unique Project.”  Midwest Folklore 7:202–206:1957.  206.

7.  Larry Nial Holcomb said Rohrbough “did not begin singing until he was a high school student [. . .] and he never played an instrument.” [22]  His source was a letter from Lynn Rohrbough dated 17 February 1972.

8.  Yabusaki majored in physical education at the University of Hawaii where she was active in the YWCA.  She later worked for Honolulu’s Parks and Recreation department. [23]

9.  “What Aloha Means.”  3 in Aloha Sampler.  CRS, 1963, 1967.  It first appeared in the American Camping Association’s Tent and Trail Songs edited by Exner in 1962.  I learned it in a Wisconsin CFG camp in 1963 where it already was part of tradition, no doubt learned from other camps rather than from a CRS book.

10.  Camp Songs.  341.

11.  Wikipedia.  “History of Accounting.”  Business records date back to Mesopotamia.  I’ve often wondered what historians thought were when they finally were able to interpret ancient documents and discovered warehouse inventories rather than lost epics like Gilgamesh.

12.  H. Smith.  “Pocket Song Book Publishing Moved, Revitalized.”  [Yellow Springs, Ohio] Community Service Newsletter.  January–February 1977.  1–2.

13.  Greene has released five CDs of fiddle music [24] and performs at local festivals in North Carolina.  He went to college in Kentucky where he learned and has preserved local music traditions. [25]

14.  I scanned everything in the file and returned it to Greene.  I am not giving the names of people who were not directly involved in the transmission of “Kumbaya,” although I can provide them if necessary.

15.  Larry Nial Holcomb.  “A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Michigan, 1972.  104.

16.  At the time I was working with Greene, he was planning to transfer the papers to the Library of Congress.  That meant a third packing and unpacking.

17.  Marvin V. Frey.  Letter to Mr. Lynn Rohrbough, 6 June 1978.  Handwritten.  WAS files.

18.  I don’t know if Rohrbough started the file, or if the interim owner found them and started the file.  I rather suspect the first.  The letter I quoted was written when Rohrbough was answering questions from Fred Waring’s Shawnee Press about his prior rights.

19.  Lynn Rohrbough.  Letter to Shawnee Press.  16 February 1959.  Typed carbon.  WAS files.

20.  Frances Lyons.  Email, 2 June 2016.  She is Reference Archivist for the United Methodist Church Archives and History Center at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.

21.  Camp Songs.  515.
22.  Holcomb.  14.
23.  Camp Songs.  341.
24.  The CDs are available from his website.
25.  “Bruce Greene.”  Blue Ridge Heritage Area website.